21 May

The second night in the tent was not as cold. My sleeping bag was nice and warm. I still had the hood pulled tight, a hat on, thermal long john and trousers, thermal vest and fleece, a thermal sleeping bag liner and a four season sleeping bag, but hey, this is Greenland - it's supposed to be cold!

Today we decided on another big summit as a group ascent. Paul and John wanted an easy day after their long trek the day before so attempted something local. All the rest went off together. We picked a summit we could see from the campsite. It looked big and a long way off. The route to it was down one glacier to a junction of three glaciers, and then up another one. The descent was easy for the first 2km, not quite steep enough to glide, but each push on the poles and kick with the skis got you a long way. Then it got steeper as it dropped down to the merge. The descent was fun, but tiring on the knees. The surface was rough and covered in scruge. Imaging the forked whipped type of icing you get around the sides of wedding cakes etc. The snow was like that. The wind blows it into weird shapes and packs it hard. Some of the features can be 6" to a 8" high. You have to avoid these, if you hit one at speed you are down (well with my skiing skills). Quite often there would be smoother channels through which you could link together to give long runs which you could zig zag down in a controlled way. Well - semi controlled way in my case. Even the smoother bits were nothing like a well groomed piste.

Looking down to the joining of the glaciers. We are heading towards the triangular mountain on the right.

All this rough snow had taken the grip wax off my skis so I stopped at the bottom to rewax. Petter came past and asked to borrow my wax. He said to get going and he would let me have it back when he went past.

At the bottom was an unusual glacier feature, a water ice lake, on a slight angle. I've never seen water ice like this in the European Alps. Quite often you have ice which is snow which has been compacted really hard. This is what glaciers are made of. This was different, it was thick clear water ice, like a lake had frozen. But it was on a slight slope. Skiing over it was interesting. Wax is useless on it, but you have so little friction you don't need any grip. Falling over is also not an option, getting up again would be nearly impossible. The trick was to plant your poles hard so they nicked the hard ice and then gently push, not extending too far back or the tips of the poles would pop out of the nick.

After the ice we were back onto conventional snow, shallow angled at first as we climbed up the glacier but slowly getting steeper. I reached the limit of what I could do with wax and decided to bail out and use skins. The others went for large zigzags up the slope. I though with the distance involved, the time it would take me to put skins on I could get back by taking a direct route up the slope. I was just about right and reached the end of the snow and the start of the rock/rubble slope the same time as Gordon and Scott. After a change of boots I walked up to the summit linking together as many snow patches as possible to avoid the rock. Still Gordon and Scott passed my taking a more direct route over the rubble.

The rubble summit of Cheops with Scott standing and Alan head to the left.

The summit gave a new set of views to areas we had not seen before. It had taken something like four hours to get there and I was surprisingly tired. The high of 2130 metres is deceptive. It's just 250 metres above camp. This does not include the descent from camp to the meeting of the glaciers. No one took a height reading for this low point, but I estimate it was about 400 metres below the camp making the total ascent 650 metres. No wonder I was tired, with big boots and skis on my legs and another pair of plastic boots on my back.

Looking back North West to Sorte Tvillinge. We had come down the right glacier and returned up the left. The very left is Icesoft Nunatak.

We named this peak Cheops. Gordon, Scott and Alan decided to head straight back to camp. Glen and John went off to ascend the west top and I did the northwest top. This was a simple ski down for 270 meters and then a gentle walk up 40 meters of ascent. This was the first summit I had got to the top of first, even if it was just a bump, but I built a cairn anyway.

On the descent back down to the low point I fell over on some hard snow and slid quite a way. In the process I broke the waist buckle on my sac, it was quite a hard impact and the sac took the worst of it. Rather than go back the way we came Scott and the others had decided to go up the third glacier and right around the summit we had done the day before. I was at least 30 minutes behind Gordon who was making a slow plod up the glacier. I soon found I had no wax left on my skis and Petter had not given my wax back. This was annoying because the angle was fine for wax but it was hard work without it. I eventually decide to give up sliding around on waxless skis and put the skins on. This was not much easier. Skis seem much heavier with skins on simply because they don't glide as well and you have to pick the up more and expend more energy moving them forward. By now I was knackered, dehydrated and out of food. The wind was also strong and cold and I had everything pulled in tight to keep the snow and wind out. It had become an exercise in relentless plodding against the wind to get back to camp and all the fun had gone. I was also annoyed with Petter for not giving my wax back now that I wanted it so much. I decided my best bet was to catch up with Gordon who always had some so I really put my head down and dipped into my reserves of energy. By the time I caught Gordon up it had steepened more so I just tucked in behind him and took it easy until the angle eased as we started to go around yesterday's summit. I then stripped off the skins and borrowed some wax for the remainder of the way back to camp. Gordon's plodding fitness came to light as he left me behind on the near flat back to camp. I crawled into camp completely exhausted and immediately accepted Scott's offer of a drink, hot sweet tea, times two.

In retrospect it was a good day, a big summit and a good tour to get a better idea of what was around. It was around 30km and 1000m of ascent, a long day.

Paul and Stary had failed on there primary objective. They had wanted to climb another summit which neighbours the campsite, via a rather steep rock ridge. When they got onto the ridge they found it was a pile of rubble waiting to fall down. They decided against it and went up two other smaller peaks on the other side of the glacier. The first defeat of the expedition, but that's the nature of expeditions.

Scott made his first phonecall home with the satellite phone that evening, just to let Paul know everything was going well. It took a bit of setting up, pointing the receiver at the satellite etc, but once it was ready it connected very quickly and there was little delay. I guess it must of been using a low earth orbit satellite.